IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY OR THE IRISH MASSACRES OF 1641-2, THEIR CAUSES AND RESULTS. Illustrated by Extracts from the unpublished State Papers, BY MARY HICKSON. WITH A PREFACE BY J. A. FROUDE, M.A. VOLUME I. 'Our ancestors were guilty of abominable and atrocious crimes, to which LONDON: LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. All rights reserved. PREFACE. THIS book needs no prefatory recommendation from me or from any one. It tells its own story, and will recommend itself by its internal merits. Nevertheless I am glad to welcome a publication which may bring about a solution of a most important historical question. The great rebellion of 1641 broke out on the 23rd of October of that year, and was alleged to have been accompanied by a series of massacres of helpless unarmed Protestant colonists, many of them women and children, who had in some cases been promised protection and a safe convoy to English garrisons by the Irish insurgents. On the recovery of the country the estates of the insurgent Irish gentry were confiscated by the Long Parliament, and were sold to pay the cost of the reconquest. A High Court of Justice sat to try the survivors charged with being actors in the massacre, and such of them as were found guilty were executed. Protestants who had retaliated upon the Catholic Irish, at Isle Magee and other places, by crimes of a similar kind, were also tried and variously punished. The anniversary of the day on which the insurrection broke out was observed with peculiar solemnity for a hundred years. The Irish massacres of 1641 became part of European history, and held a place of infamy by the side of the Sicilian Vespers and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. We are now asked to believe that the entire story was a |